il, religious, from city and
from country, land and sea, of unlike occupations, buoyant with youth,
grave with years. The momentary tie has poetical vitality, from the fact
that it is borrowed from the heart of the time and of England. They are
Pilgrims from all quarters to the shrine of England's illustrious and
favourite Saint, the martyr of Canterbury. They have gradually mustered
into cavalcade in coming up from the shires to the metropolis, one
excepted--the Poet. He falls into their party, by the hap of sleeping the
night preceding the journey out from the capital at the same inn, in the
suburb towards Canterbury--Southwark.

The specific incitement of the Tale-telling is thus invented in a natural
spirit, and aptly to the vivacity of the whole conception. Mine host of
the Tabard, Henry Bailey, a hearty fellow no doubt, since Chaucer has
thought his name worthy of his immortalizing, contrives the proceeding,
and this half in good fellowship, and half in the way of his trade. To
shorten the tediousness of the road, he proposes that each of them shall
tell, on the way to Canterbury, one tale, and on the way back,
another--or, for here the poem a little disagrees with itself, two tales
going and two returning; and that he or she who tells the best tale shall
have, on their return, a supper, for which all the others shall pay, and
which of course, he, Henry Bailey, shall provide. Upon these terms he
will, without fee, perform the part of their conductor to Canterbury and
back again. In assenting, the Pilgrims constitute him the judge of the
tales; and thus mine host, with his joyous temper, courtesy, where
courtesy needs, worldly sense, rough, sharp, and ready wit, and
unappealable dictatorship in all matters of the commonwealth, becomes a
dramatic person of the very first consequence, the animating soul of the
poetical action; and who, continually stepping in between the finishing of
one tale and the beginning of the next, organically links together the
otherwise disunited and incomposite Series.

The General Prologue contains, as was unavoidable, besides the scheme of
the poem, the description of the several Pilgrims, and constitutes in
itself, by the versatile feeling with which the portraits are seized, by
the strength, precision, peculiarity, liveliness, rapidity, and number of
the strokes with which each is individualized--a masterpiece of poetical
painting. One lost generation of Old England moves before us in